Bill Watterson is Mark Twain -- with a drawing pen. He is a
master cartoonist, but also a sharp-witted observer of the absurd, with
an impish sense of humor. From 1985-1995, Watterson penned "Calvin and
Hobbes," the truly marvelous comic strip that featured six-year-old
Calvin and his stuffed tiger Hobbes. In Calvin's inventive and
iconoclastic mind, Hobbes was a genuine tiger (and his best friend) and
they shared boundless adventures that challenged conventional thinking
and defied authority, often crashing right through the prescribed social order of the "real" world.

A recurring theme in the strip was a two-player baseball competition
in which both the kid and the tiger simply made up the rules as they
went. In one strip, Calvin has hit the ball thrown by Hobbes, and he's
scampering toward home plate:

Calvin: Ha Ha! A home run!Hobbes: You didn't touch all the bases!Calvin: I did, too.Hobbes: No, you didn't. You didn't touch seventh base.Calvin: Yes, I did! I touched the water barrel right after the front porch.Hobbes: That's not seventh base. That's twelfth base!Calvin: I thought the garage door was twelfth.Hobbes: The garage door is twenty-third base. You touched them all out of order, and you didn't touch the secret base.Calvin: The secret base?? What's the secret base?!Hobbes: I can't tell you. It's a secret.

That exchange between a six-year-old and a stuffed tiger pretty well
sums up the nonsensical political gamesmanship being played out today by
the five-man lineup of corporatists on the Supreme Court: Chief Justice
John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin
Scalia, and Clarence Thomas. They are on an unrestrained ideological
tear, making up their own rules to score big points for corporate power.
Reasoning? Try twenty-third base! Precedent? Throw it out! History?
Rewrite it! The Constitution? Slide by it! Judicial restraint? Only for
liberals! Logic? That's a secret! The rule of law? The law is us!

Only, this isn't a game. Barely six years into Roberts' tenure, he
and his narrow majority have thoroughly politicized the Court. The one
branch of our national government that was intentionally designed by the
Founders to set the rule of law above politics has been turned into
another political front group to advance corporate rule. The
Constitution granted life tenure to the justices specifically so they
could feel free to stand up to wealthy wrongdoers -- particularly those
avaricious business schemers who wanted to endanger the people's rule by
establishing, as Jefferson put it, "the aristocracy of our moneyed
corporations."

Hiding under robes

"Leveling the playing field can sound like a good thing. But in a democracy, campaigning for office is not a game." -- Chief Justice John Roberts, fumbling a sports metaphor in a June
ruling that does, indeed, tilt the political field to assure that
corporate-backed players win the crucial money game.

In case after case, the five hard-core Republicans of the Roberts
Court have been chopping furiously at the hard-earned legal rights of
workers, consumers, voters, and others who dare to challenge the power
of big business elites to reign over us, both politically and
economically. There has been way too little public attention focused on
(much less a sustained political challenge to) what has become a
spectacular abuse of government power. A survey last year by the Pew
Center found that nearly three-fourths of Americans have no idea who John Roberts is.
Eight percent named Thurgood Marshall as the chief justice (and I
certainly wish he was, even though he's been dead for 18 years).

It's not that the public is stupid, but that the Court deliberately
hides itself. No C-SPAN or other television cameras are allowed, even in
the relatively few times the justices convene in public session. The
bulk of the justices' official policy-making work takes place behind
closed doors. They practically never have press conferences or give
interviews, and some have even refused to let the media cover their "public" speeches.

Curiously, mass media outlets show little journalistic curiosity
about the doings of this tiny but enormously powerful third branch of
our national government. If Obama so much as sneezes, newscasters and
pundits are all over it, and hordes of reporters and analysts constantly
poke into the back rooms and dark corridors of Congress. Yet, nine
black-robed mandarins -- with the power to overturn the decisions of the
two elected branches, as well as decisions by state governments and even
of the voting public -- sit in splendid obscurity in an imposing, white
marble bunker, periodically tossing out rulings that essentially make
law.

When the mass media do cover the Court (usually only when a new
justice is named or a major edict is handed down), the reporting is
superficial, even lazy. Two months ago, for example, the New York Times ran an "analysis" of decisions in the 2010-2011
term, concluding that the hallmark of the Roberts Court is "defending
free speech." Never mind that it is corporate speech that they have
radically enhanced, to the detriment of your voice and mine. But the
Times didn't probe.

It's time for you and me to probe, because the
Roberts-Alito-Kennedy-Scalia-Thomas cabal is openly aligning itself with
the all-out political push by such far-right billionaires as the Koch
brothers to impose a corporate plutocracy over America (see February 2010 and June 2011Lowdown s). "Come on, Hightower," you might say, "such learned jurists wouldn't be engaged in such extremism." Oh? Remember Bush v. Gore in December 2000?
In that case, five justices abruptly shoved their way into totally
unprecedented, overtly partisan territory to dictate who would be
America's president. With no need to do so, they imperiously interrupted
a recount of the people's vote in Florida, usurped jurisdiction from
state courts, invented a legal theory out of thin air, and arbitrarily
seated corporate-favorite George W in the White House.

This was so far beyond the bounds of the Court's role, such an
arrogant act of magisterial extremism, that none of the usurpers were
willing to claim the decision as their own. None put their name on the
opinion. Also, in an extraordinary confession, the opinion itself
concedes its legal shoddiness by saying that it's a one-of-a-kind
decision that should not be cited as a precedent for any other case.
Tellingly, it hasn't been.

Eleven years later, three of those five Bush v. Gore judicial
extremists -- Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas -- are still on the bench, forming
a solid core of today's corporate cabal.

Also, while it's not widely known, Roberts himself was a key member
of Bush's election-stealing team in Florida. A protege of Republican
attack dog Kenneth Starr, Roberts was a corporate lawyer in Washington
at the time (becoming a multi-millionaire by helping such clients as Big
Coal defend the abominable mining method of mountaintop removal). He
was flown to Florida to polish legal briefs and do a dress rehearsal to
prepare Bush's lead lawyer for getting the Supremes to seize the
election for the Republican.

In 2005, George W returned the favor by entrusting the top spot on
the nation's highest Court to this radical corporate activist. With the
addition of Alito in 2006, Corporate America had its slim ideological
majority in place.

Not only did pro-corporate decisions begin to flow, but the cabal
also became brazen about its alliance with the right-wing Republican
network that's now pushing aggressively in Washington, state capitals,
and all of America's courts to rewrite laws so an "aristocracy of our
moneyed corporations" can rise above the American people's democratic
rights and authority. Jeff Shesol, author of Supreme Power (a history of FDR's fight with the Court), wrote a June New York Times op-ed
about this "flurry of judicial fraternization," warning that it
threatens to destroy the Court's credibility as an impartial guardian of
the rule of law. Here's a sampling of their fraternization:

Jim Hightower is an American populist, spreading his message of democratic hope via national radio commentaries, columns, books, his award-winning monthly newsletter (The Hightower Lowdown) and barnstorming tours all across America.